In this episode, Simone and I discuss the rise of anti-vitalism cults and how to defend ourselves against them. We are joined by the YouTuber Rubyard, creator of the popular YouTube channel What If? All His Thoughts, to talk about the dangers of these cults, and how we can defend ourselves.
00:00:22.040And people will say it is off-putting because they find these groups' vitality, a condemnation of themselves.
00:00:28.300But when you meet somebody in a cult, like an extractive cult, you'll see that they seem kind of dead.
00:00:33.960Like, they've got these fake smiles, but they're not really have any level of vitality to them.
00:00:38.900And I think that what we have seen is our society has been taken over by one of these anti-vitality nihilistic cults.
00:00:48.480And now the dangerous part, which really excited me in your video and you're addressing this as an issue, is those of us who still have a level of vitality, that are still happy with our lives, still excited about the future, are existentially threatening to the cult.
00:01:34.580Like, I am jealous, but not jealous in a way where, like, sometimes I look at someone and I'm like, their videos are, like, not as good as mine.
00:02:01.580A lot of people know, you know, we are in, well, I'll get to this later.
00:02:06.100But what I wanted to focus on was the nihilist mice in the Mouse Utopia experiment.
00:02:10.880And, one, to defend against them and their relation to the left.
00:02:15.720So, I'm going to go into this video assuming the audience broadly knows about the Mouse Utopia experiment.
00:02:20.640Mice, given anything they want, ended up coalescing into urban-like clusters.
00:02:25.800And then doing a lot of behavior that looks a lot like our society today.
00:02:30.120And then their fertility rate collapsed and their society died.
00:02:33.200But what was really interesting, and I'll let you lay out this behavior, is this, when mice tried to continue to live the old ways, they were victimized.
00:02:42.860So, I'd like you to talk about this, why you think this happened, and the correlates you see to society today.
00:02:47.640And then we can discuss how we might defend against it.
00:02:53.960And the way I'll answer your question is that I do a lot of thinking not part of what if I'll test, that operates in the back.
00:03:02.200And I gradually filtered that into what if I'll test.
00:03:05.500And one of the conclusions I've come to is that the soul does exist.
00:03:09.520And the reason I believe that, and this will lead to what you're saying, because only through understanding the existence of the soul are you capable of seeing how nihilism can take root.
00:03:17.960And I came to the conclusion the soul exists partly due to projection, where if you're projecting your inner flaws upon the external world, that means there is a part of your mind that is aware of what your inner flaws are.
00:03:30.800And if you look over history, animals do things that are not rational or in their self-interest.
00:03:37.720And the way I like to see mouse utopia is that you can have multiple tiers of causation for the exact same event.
00:03:45.500You can find about five different things that caused the fall of Rome, and it's almost a Rorschach test for which variables you choose to tease out and are most important.
00:03:56.060And with mouse utopia, you can see it starting upon multiple levels of causation, one being you could look at an ecosystem perspective where the ecosystem needs to reset because if one form of life expands exponentially large, it will hurt the entire ecosystem.
00:04:14.140But when you look at the nihilism for the mouse utopia, there are multiple levels of causation.
00:04:20.180One level of causation is that once you are in a pre-established wealthy society, there is no incentive to cooperate.
00:04:30.920So the incentive is to free ride, and that results in negative nihilism because the endpoint of free riding is saying that the non-free riders are bad.
00:04:41.940So nihilism is a way of preventing other people from stopping you from free riding so that you can basically do whatever you want.
00:04:50.800The problem, though, is you hit tragedy at the common situations where if everyone's trying to stop trying to free ride, there's nothing to free ride off.
00:04:59.140And I also think that past a certain point, people get resentful.
00:05:03.680If you've reached a certain point in nihilism, you were emotional.
00:05:06.880You get resentful against the people who are not like you.
00:05:10.480And so it becomes this recursive thing where you hate the reminder that you're doing something wrong.
00:05:15.980And with the mouse utopia experiment, something that I find very interesting is the thing that kills the other mice is not the mice not having kids.
00:05:24.780It's the nihilist mice killing those who do have kids.
00:05:30.080Before you go further, I want to highlight these ideas you've had because I think they are so powerful.
00:05:35.060And they're really, really like not things to just grow.
00:05:38.760So within all social animals, whether it's human or mice or anything like that, you're going to get some level of self-consciousness, it appears.
00:05:46.960And this is one of the things that surprised you when you were first looking at the experiment is how similar the mice were to humans in many ways when we think of them as being such simple animals to the extent where if I'm a human and I am living off the state because no human wants to see themselves as a bad person.
00:06:01.820Or if I am a mouse and I'm just living completely indulgently without thinking about the future of my civilization or anything like that.
00:06:06.840Like that's not really how mice are working, but kind of like that.
00:06:09.900But if I'm a human and I'm just living completely off the state, I need to justify this behavioral pattern.
00:06:20.300Nothing really matters because it is not constructive to live off the state.
00:06:24.340So the only value hierarchy that can justify this behavior pattern is nihilism.
00:06:29.480And then I begin to, I look at the people who are still putting in the effort and they are a reminder to me.
00:06:37.080Like in leftist thought, their existence or their ideology causes violence to me, where violence is defined by anything that causes emotional pain.
00:06:46.460And it's causing this emotional pain because it's reminding the part of you that is still sane that what you are doing is indolent and self-indulgent.
00:06:55.300And so then you project the hatred out on these other communities and you begin to demonize these communities.
00:07:04.520And then this demonization, and I know I'm just repeating everything you say, but I want to really make sure this sinks in for people because it's so powerful, creates a loop.
00:07:12.780And in this loop, you see these other groups who have maintained these old ways of doing things or these more natural ways of doing things.
00:07:20.260And they are still happy with their lives. Like they have kids, they are engaged, they have partners.
00:07:25.720And you have descended into this cycle of self-hatred, which is a result of nihilism and a result of knowing that you're not actually living for anything other than yourself.
00:07:35.940And this cycle gets worse and worse and worse over time. And then what? Continue. Sorry, I just...
00:07:42.280You explained that very well. And the thing which worries me so much about Mass Utopia is that it has very close historical parallels.
00:07:50.900Where a method I use to determine... Because you get studies all the time. Most studies are never verified.
00:07:56.260They're just scientists can just make stuff up and they'll never be called out for it.
00:07:59.700And the thing that scares me about Mass Utopia is the parallels you can draw to so many other historic societies, where if you read authors going back to Herodotus, you see that this pattern of society is growing wealthy, losing their values, and then collapsing into decadence and getting conquered.
00:08:15.940It's just something that's happened to each of the major civilizations, whether Rome, whether the Mayans, the Persians, the Chinese, whatever.
00:08:22.480And the thing that I find scary is that we are in the West today at a level of wealth much higher than any of those other societies.
00:08:31.900So would it not go to reason that we'd have a higher level of decadence?
00:08:35.220And I think the point that Malcolm was jumping off when we started this is that I said in the video that the thing that shocked me about the new left, because I'll compare my predictions from year to year.
00:08:45.480And as of four years ago, I was able to predict the left would go crazy, because I looked at social justice, I looked at the institutions they ran, and I realized there was no feedback loop inside social justice to sanity.
00:08:56.700The thing, though, is that we have 100 years of track record of leftist insanity already.
00:09:01.700Look to Cuba, look to Russia, look at China, look at Venezuela.
00:09:04.260And this current leftist insanity, it's nihilistic, which is fascinating, because the left should in abstract be an incredibly optimistic philosophy, since they believe utopia is around the corner.
00:09:17.560But our left has no positive vision of the world.
00:09:21.860And the thing that really shocks me is Western society is committing social suicide.
00:09:25.440And I believe this to be most pronounced in North Europe, where Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, they bring in millions of immigrants, and a lot of these countries, they'll be half non-native population by 2050 if things don't change, or half of their children, half of the young will not be native population by 2050.
00:09:43.040And the thing that really shocked me is degrowth, where I just can't wrap my head around why degrowth is an idea.
00:09:49.800Because if you look at it from a climate perspective, if the Netherlands just stopped being an economy, it doesn't matter.
00:09:59.420You could nuke the entirety of Northern Europe, and it wouldn't affect the economy, the world's carbon emissions by that much.
00:10:05.640And furthermore, these are the kinds of countries that would develop the future climate technology.
00:10:09.440And so, using the left's own chain of logic, there is no justification for the suicide of their societies, except it just being a rationalization for them being suicidal.
00:10:20.500Well, I love, in the video, you also talked about the erasure of their own history and culture identity, in the tearing down of statues, in the tearing down of traditional forms of artistic medium.
00:10:30.720And one of the things that you said in the video, which chilled people, it was one of your top comments, and I agree with it, is that we have stopped producing art.
00:10:37.900You had mentioned that when you watch movies today, they don't seem as dynamic, like people don't seem as alive as they did in previous movies.
00:10:46.560They seem sort of odd and robotic, almost like the souls have left of their body.
00:10:51.100I'd love you to elaborate on the hits first, too.
00:10:53.620I'm glad you pulled this out, because that's one of my favorite things I said in the video.
00:10:58.260And I'm happy that people teased it out.
00:11:52.720And I think one of, for you who don't know me as a person, one of my massive hobbies outside of What If Altist is pop music.
00:12:01.440I listen to several hours of music every day.
00:12:05.480I listen to a bunch of different music genres.
00:12:07.760And since the Trump presidency, and I'm just picking that year as an arbitrary date, and I don't think it had anything to actually do with Trump.
00:12:14.920The level of artistic creativity in music has just crashed.
00:13:01.480I want to touch on something you said here, because when you talk about people seeming like off, it's definitely something I've noticed as well.
00:13:09.900And it reminds me, when you encounter a group that's radically different culturally, you'll often notice either you'll seem to have less life than the society around them or more life than the society around them.
00:13:21.320If you have ever interacted often with, I think, sort of extremist religious types like Amish people, for example.
00:13:44.340And people will say it is off-putting because they find these groups' vitality a condemnation of themselves.
00:13:51.520But when you meet somebody in a cult, like an extractive cult, you'll see that they seem kind of dead.
00:13:57.180Like, they've got these fake smiles, but they're not really have any level of vitality to them.
00:14:01.500And I think that what we have seen is our society has been taken over by one of these anti-vitality nihilistic cults.
00:14:11.700And now the dangerous part, which really excited me in your video and you're addressing this as an issue, is those of us who still have a level of vitality, that are still happy with our lives, still excited about the future, are existentially threatening to the cult.
00:14:44.000So to jump off your point, what you've said about religious people, traditional conservative religious people seeming more alive is true.
00:14:50.440When I'm traveling to the Middle East, that's obvious.
00:14:52.800Going to Egypt, people seem a lot more alive.
00:14:56.020Moving from California, I spent a couple months in California, now I'm in Texas.
00:15:00.520People are much more alive in Texas than they are in California.
00:15:03.400And the thing that I find interesting is everything we project onto the Victorian period or the 1950s is a reflection of our own society.
00:15:12.300Where if you read Victorian literature, we pretend the Victorian period is puritanical, emotionally stunted, repressive, and cold.
00:15:22.880And you read books from the 19th century, that's clearly not true.
00:15:26.060It's a very emotional, dramatic society.
00:15:28.220I actually think the 19th century, it had romanticism.
00:15:31.460It was a significantly more emotional society than today.
00:15:34.100But because our society is built in opposition to that, we project our failings upon that, where I think we are actually a very unemotional and cold and stunted society.
00:15:46.240And so to jump back to the point you asked me, the thing that terrifies me about Mass Utopia is things have to get worse.
00:15:55.800Where I imagine it like a treadmill, and the treadmill now is going really fast, and there's no way out except for these institutions to burn down.
00:16:06.520Because you look at academia, you look at Hollywood, you look at these corporations, there is no counter to wokeness.
00:17:04.520Well, and I can elaborate, because this is something that we've talked about offline, and I find it really interesting.
00:17:09.260Because I think that we, you and I, represent two extremes that are actually opposed to each other.
00:17:17.160But it's the same solution to the larger societal problems.
00:17:21.080Which is that we need cohesive, new cohesive cultural groups to fight against what's coming if we want any form of protection.
00:17:28.300And what's really interesting, and where I would point my followers to your channel, is people know that we're trying to start, like, a new cohesive group, like Simone and I, or, like, religious denominational system.
00:18:07.920So I, for you who don't know me as a person, I am very much into mysticism, and it's something I study a lot in my free time.
00:18:17.380And one of the things I've been looking to is the research on psychics and the CIA and the spirit world, where the CIA had decades' worth of research into the spirit world, where they found that it was a real place.
00:18:31.020And they got hundreds of people to visit it on repeat.
00:18:33.940And the military's assessment of the CIA's science was that it was all correct.
00:18:37.920The Soviets had their own version of this, which found the same results.
00:18:42.140And my take is that if every major society in history agrees on this, with the 20th century being the one exception, and then the 20th century found it to be real, I personally find that to be compelling evidence.
00:18:55.280I know this is something Malcolm and I disagree on, and we're allowed to disagree, but I think our society is so cold and impersonal, and why do we do anything?
00:19:08.920That's something I feel in the subconscious of our society, that we don't have a sense of why we're living life.
00:19:18.480And I think that's something that we very much need, and without it, we're going crazy.
00:19:23.080I was reading a book by an Orthodox theologian who said, the modern world is divided between those who try to constantly numb themselves to its meaninglessness, and those who realize it and go crazy.
00:19:35.920So what I find so interesting about your thought is it is a form of mysticism and mystical thinking that I think is very compatible with industry and industrial and artistic productivity.
00:19:50.820But I think that the way that you accomplish this is very interesting in your thought pattern, is that the mystical traditions which end up going towards indolence are based around, like, secrecy and hierarchy, where you have mystical traditions which are dripped down through a hierarchy through a level of, like, secrecy, whereas your mystical traditions, they approach everything like an investigation or a conspiracy almost.
00:20:16.300Like, these things are out there for anyone to find, but it is up to every individual to find them in multiple places.
00:20:24.320There are no, like, keepers of knowledge or anything like that.
00:20:27.720And I think that combining it with, like, actual science and investigative history is actually very similar to the forms of mysticism we saw within productive Victorian period.
00:20:38.900Like, Isaac Newton, he was a mystic, but he wasn't, like, a general mystic.
00:20:43.220He was, like, an occultist who would, like, research old texts and everything like that.
00:20:47.120But anyway, yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
00:20:51.280And one of the points I make in the video, when I talk to the CI and the spirit world, is what these researchers found is there's a geography to the spirit world.
00:20:58.640Where there are parts of the spirit world that appear Abrahamic, there are parts that appear Indic, parts that appear, like, reincarnation.
00:21:04.840So I don't believe there's contradiction between the major world's religions.
00:21:08.420I think they're touching a shared truth in different contexts that are useful to their society.
00:21:14.280And I don't want to lionize religion and say it's perfect, because the problem is that we can all get fuzzy and agree on that.
00:21:22.860But once you actually have to apply it to the real human world and politics, that's when things get messy.
00:21:29.240Where, ironically, the Christians, the Jews, and the Muslims are theologically very similar.
00:21:34.480Once you get to the details, though, that's where the pain starts.
00:21:38.380And so I do believe there's this shared truth.
00:21:41.460But the truth, you have to, imagine you have to clean out your attic.
00:21:44.500You go into the attic, you flash it, use a flashlight there.
00:21:47.560And if you're not going to shine light upon your attic, you're not going to clean anything.
00:21:54.060And with these occult traditions that are negative, what you're basically doing is taking people up to the attic, holding them in hand, then not showing them the light, so that they have to hold your hand in the attic to survive.
00:22:06.160What the mystic tradition is, it flips the light switch.
00:22:15.840For those who don't understand why we go so anti-mystic with our traditions, I really do recommend his video, Did the CIA Discover the Spirit World?
00:22:25.640And I think it's a great example of where taking the mystical path can lead a very logical, smart individual in terms of getting them to circumvent what I would consider a reasonable amount of incredulity when engaging with information.
00:22:45.360Rubier had actually texted us a comment that must have come from one of our watchers under the video, which was something along the lines of, oh dear, I hope Malcolm doesn't see this.
00:22:56.220Which I think really shows, even if you are approaching mysticism from the perspective of the literal best approach to it, which I do think his approach is.
00:23:10.220You know, this level of conspiratorial investigation makes the way he is structuring his belief system not particularly susceptible to individuals who want to use a person's belief system to control a person, which I really respect about it.
00:23:27.480But it does burn about of his incredulity and logic.
00:23:33.400For people to understand why we do not take any evidence of the spirit world from the studies that he's looking at here, we'll probably do a video debunking them at some point.
00:23:42.880But I don't even know if they need to be debunked.
00:23:46.000I think even just a logical and rational person watching his video from somebody who believes him can understand why somebody wouldn't.
00:23:54.860I mean, the guy who was managing all of this research thought he directly was talking with God and was giving people information and saw demons and aliens and ghosts before any of this ever happened.
00:24:08.920Well, I love that you are, you know, elevating this within some of your videos as a potential solution, because I really do think it is the only potential solution, is a return to theological framings of reality, but that break from the theological framings of the old.
00:24:24.780In many ways, and I'll put a little clip here, the old religious traditions that are like, oh, we'll just do things in that pre-industrial way and this will protect our children from deconversion in the modern world.
00:24:51.980It's like, no, that obviously isn't going to work.
00:24:54.920The odds are so astronomical against you.
00:24:57.840We need some level of adaptation and we need to all work together, no matter how different our beliefs are, because whatever those beliefs are, we're the people they're coming after.
00:25:06.820I mean, there's clearly like the one big, bad, negative group.
00:25:10.820Yes, I hate churchism, or churchism is the continuation of the ceremony of religion without God.
00:25:20.040And I think most religion in our society is churchism, in that I think a lot of these people don't actually care or want God.
00:25:27.920I think they use it as an excuse, but if you read the Bible, the God of the Bible is disgusting and insane, and it's not the white bread shirts that the Christians, that religious people now push.
00:25:41.020But the problem is that the God of the Bible, that is a force that's in touch with the reality of how horrible life is and how crazy life is.
00:25:49.660And so we've been trying too long to domesticate religion.
00:25:53.900And I believe religions go through cycles where if you read about what it was like in the Roman Empire, all of the religions were incredibly sterile and political.
00:26:02.680And if you were before the Axial Age, under the time of Buddha and Confucius and Plato, it was the same thing.
00:26:08.260But you have to have these periodic returns of mysticism and chaos to offset the bureaucratization of a religion.
00:26:17.580Well, someone, I want to hear from you because I've been monopolizing this.
00:26:21.840Well, no, I just, what I find interesting and what I think is important for us to recognize is that what we have that the poor rodents in the mouse utopia experiments didn't have was places to hide.
00:26:34.980They couldn't hide after a certain point.
00:26:37.200There was no place where like the pernatalist, non-nihilistic mice could go.
00:26:41.960I mean, I know the beautiful ones like hid away in some other weird place.
00:27:12.940It's not like we're fighting against doesn't have children and they want us all dead.
00:27:16.660I think that a lot of why the pernatalist movement is so difficult to like quantify or contact is that the conclusion that most of them have come to is we really, really, really need to hide and be careful and not let anyone who know who we are, what we're building or what our movement or community is like, unless they are 100% definitely a trusted insider that we're going to network with in the future.
00:27:42.740And I think that's a core part of what is going to enable these groups to move forward in a way that the like more normal prenatalist mice or rats could not.
00:27:55.740Their secret base is going to be in Newark, New Jersey.
00:27:58.480So you guys can keep tabs on that and look nowhere else.
00:28:01.140And so in the video, I say there are three things you need to do to survive mouse utopia.
00:28:09.140The first is that you need to have a sense of that the antinatalist people can't take over the government.
00:28:24.380Because if they take over the government, they can kill anyone who's trying to survive and have children.
00:28:31.600And that really worries me because if you look at mouse utopia, that's what happens.
00:28:36.240And if the government's killing anyone who has children in America, the entire American nation, that's the only way they can die.
00:28:42.380The second is you need to form communities out of the way of like-minded, sane people who can support each other.
00:28:49.040And the third thing is you need religion because religion can provide external moral standards that you can convince a large part of the population to follow as a push against the chaos of the world.
00:29:35.080Yeah, but that's – I think that's an important point is that you are also inspiring to us because you represent what humanity should be doing rather than what humanity is doing.
00:29:43.980Yeah, but what we can go back to, quite frankly, again, like Benjamin Franklin was like fully like acting as though he were an early career adult of like age 12, 13.
00:29:53.180And then by, you know, his 20s, he was, you know, a major leading thought leader.
00:30:17.500You know, because we – well, I mean, people are very suggestible.
00:30:20.640And if we don't have role models, it's a lot harder to like realize that you're capable of something if you've never heard of someone else being capable of it.
00:30:27.360I remember when I was a child, the only historic figure I had heard of was Martin Luther King because when I was six, that was the only person my school taught me about.
00:30:36.520And I think – I don't dislike Martin Luther King.
00:30:49.740It sounds like you're saying we need some white role models.
00:30:53.780And I don't know if that is appropriate.
00:30:55.700Let's develop a racial quota based upon the demographics of the country.
00:30:59.980We can have six out of ten white Europeans.
00:31:03.200We can have two Hispanics like Hernan Cortez, who was also a white European.
00:31:08.220And we can have Martin Luther King for our 12% black population.
00:31:12.240Well, or we can have what, you know, Gemini was trying to do before Google decided to apologize, which is just make the founding fathers black.